Il Miglior Fabbro? On Gordon Lish's Editing of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Introduction In April 1981, when What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appeared, Raymond Carver was still little known to wider audiences and few could predict that he was soon to be acclaimed as the “American Chekhov” and the father of literary Minimalism. Yet, those seventeen short fragments managed to reinvigorate the realistic trend of the short-story with their spare and laconic portrait of small-town America: a portrait free of condescendence, irony, or denunciation, yet full of hopeless desolation. That collection’s pared-down narrative has come to represent for many readers Raymond Carver’s stylistic trademark, although it undeniably marks a “minimalistic” peak in his career, and a point of no return. It is precisely in relation to that minimalism that we shall reconsider the role played in the collection’s final output by Gordon Lish, Carver’s longtime editor and friend. To do so, we shall analyze the scope and the extent of Lish’s editorial work on the collection, as it is now visible in the archives of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.